Wednesday, May 30, 2007

The spies nobody's talking about

There appears to be widespread public antipathy to the spying campaign run by Clark and Thompson on behalf of state-owned enterprise Solid Energy, to the extent that the government has had to do some tut tutting. That won't be much comfort to activists in the Save Happy Valley campaign and in Peace Action Wellington, who have had private e mails stolen and private conversations reported. (If Clark and Thompson's mole was really on the ball, she may have snared a rather plodding outline of the history of East Timor which was emailed to PAW last week by yours truly. I hope that she read it to the end and felt really disappointed to learn about Australian atrocities during World War Two and cooperative farming in the seventies, rather than plans to plant dynamite under Te Papa or similar paranoid nonsense.)

If it's wrong to use public money to spy, though, where does this leave the Security Intelligence Service, which has resources Thompson and Clark can never match and answers directly to the Prime Minister? The SIS gets tens of millions a year from the taxpayer, operates in near-total secrecy, aside from the occasional embarrassing leak, and seems to spend a good chunk of its time spying on the activist left. In the the 1970s and '80s the SIS devoted thousands of hours to staking out Owen Wilkes. In 1996 they got caught breaking into the house of fair trade activist Aziz Choudry. A couple of years ago they were accused of spying on Maori nationalists. I haven't noticed anybody in the Beehive tut tutting these folk.

It'd be good see somebody like Keith Locke, or a group in the spotlight like Peace Action Wellington, try to deepen the debate about spying by bringing in the SIS. The Alliance used to call for the abolition of the organisation back in the '90s, but changed course after entering government. The Greens opposed the SIS Bill that was rushed through parliament in the aftermath of the Chaudry affair, but since then there's been almost no public debate about the SIS, despite the fact that its budget has increased markedly since the beginning of George Bush's War of Terror.

Two year olds tend to divide opinion. Some people dote on the cute little things, knitting them jumpers that will soon be too small, reading them bedside stories they can’t understand, and hanging on their every mispronounced word. Other, possibly more objective adults speak of the ‘terrible twos’, and hope the little horrors will soon grow out of midnight tantrums and food flinging.

It seems only natural, then, that Titus Books should be dividing writers and readers up and down the country, two years after it threw its first stone into the small and rather stagnant pond known as New Zealand literature. In the most recent issue of Landfall, this country’s oldest literary rag, Katherine Liddy gave the new boy the thumbs up, declaring that ‘with Titus, New Zealand literature just got a whole lot more interesting’. Reviewing Bill Direen’s Titus-published novel Song of the Brakeman in the Autumn 2007 issue of New Zealand Books, Heather Murray took a far less indulgent view of the little brat, accusing it of a ‘personal anarchy’ that makes ‘successful writing’ impossible. Ouch.

Mairangi Bay shock-blogger and rising literary star Jack Ross has weighed into the debate, by calling Titus ‘the Flying Nun of the twentieth century’. The comparison isn’t quite as silly as it might seem. Like the legendary Flying Nun Records, Titus is a low budget, high art operation designed to preserve and publicise work that the mainstream culture industry either marginalises or ignores altogether. While the big university-based publishers roll on down the middle of the literary road, Titus specialises in finding interesting things in that dangerous-looking ditch beside the left lane.

The Flying Nun comparison works, too, when we consider that a couple of the three latest poets to be published by Titus are seasoned live performers, as familiar with the dodgy PAs and flying glasses of Auckland’s seedier pubs as any sad middle-aged muso. Richard Taylor was a member of the drunken, drugged up Poetry Brats, the dominant gang on Auckland’s live poetry scene in the early 1990s. Will Christie was a mainstay of the same scene in the first years of the noughties, when she was known for the bizarre, Goth-influenced aerobics exercises that accompanied her readings.If Titus is the Flying Nun of Kiwi literature, then Will Christie is the Dead C. Like that chaotic but sometimes exhilarating band, she has chosen to make an art form out of fragmentation and dissonance. The Dead C torture guitars, to produce exquisite bursts of feedback and fragments of mangled melody; Christie tortures her language, and gets a similar effect:

Ladylaydelaydeladylaydelaydeladylay de

Lady fOR GO

get IT !!SURE

Broken sentences, hyperactive syntax, and runaway punning give Christie’s writing a deliberately unfinished feel. These poems are like open-ended jams. Christie wants you to take your hands off you ears, pick up a guitar, and play with her, or against her - to lay a solo or a slab of feedback over her unsteady riffing.

Richard Taylor perhaps deserves to be called the Chris Knox of Titus Books. Taylor has Knox’s quirkiness, his tirelessness, and his disconcerting tendency to veer from highfalutin’ phraseology to Kiwi crudity at the drop of a beer:

God lives in the stone these days, terrified of his child, paralysed by insanity or the surprise of something leaping, like that wave by Hokusai. Suffering piles - he can’t think of anything else: of nothing else think he. Everything blowing to fuck.

Taylor’s book is divided between the wild and often wildly funny poems that he performed in the ’90s, and the more sober - I use that adjective advisedly - pieces of recent years. The ‘bridge’ between the two groups is ‘Hospital’, a long poem-journal that Taylor kept during a sometimes nightmarish stay in Middlemore Hospital in 2004. Lying in a crowded and noisy ward, deprived of drugs and alcohol, and forced to listen to the nihilistic monologues of a patient who has just done a seventeen year tour of duty in Paremoremo Prison, Taylor finds a new directness, and perhaps a new honesty:

The short dream shifts. Am I now awake? The night nurse talks to an arthritic young man called Garth about his infected leg. Spider Man, Third Man, is asleep, I think. The old man was coughing. I say (in a loutish voice, as if rallying): ‘How are we team!’ I can’t move far with my leg cast so I can’t hold the old bugger’s hand. Night is the time of fear. We are visited. The nurse take my piss bottle. Moves on, returns. My toes wiggle more - more feeling…

The manic wordplay of Taylor’s early poetry and the wry, sometimes self-deprecatory exercises of more recent years sit beside one another a little uneasily, like strangers forced together on an overcrowded train. Perhaps the sequel to Conversation with a Stone will see them talking to one another?

Scott Hamilton’s favourite Flying Nun band is probably The Verlaines. Hamilton shares with Graeme Downes’ outfit a taste for complex structures, a fondness for allusion, and - let’s face it - a tendency to walk the fine line between intelligence and pretension. Like Downes and his cronies, Hamilton seems to have spent too long in a university library. Reading his prose poems is like going to a cool but boring party and being trapped with the weird guy you haven’t seen since seventh form - the guy wearing brown-rimmed glasses and a brown dufflecoat, and drinking someone else’s Corona - who wants to talk about his pet obsession. Part of you wants to get away, to mingle with the beautiful people and talk about cars or designer drugs, but another part of you somehow wants to know more about Bob Dylan’s unreleased recordings, or socialism in Venezuela, or the differences between a pole and a post.A typical Hamilton poem begins as a slightly stuffy discourse about some specific subject, before becoming first strangely obsessive, and then obsessively strange, as pedantry turns into poetry. Here’s the end of a poem which began as a guide to the theory of evolution:

Before the flood dinosaurs, mammoths, and humans were contemporaries. Then the rock-strata were laid down, like backing tracks. The dinosaurs sank fastest, of course…Noah ran aground on an alpine peak, discovering a clinic that housed wealthy TB patients. We have been sickly and wasteful ever since, and we can only change by hiding ourselves. Cut off your tongue, and you will become telepathic. Pluck out your eyes, and you will hear extinct native birds chiming in the boughs. Crush your scrotum between two stones, and you will be able to fall in love. This is called evolution.

I’d wager that Hamilton is one of that generation of males raised in the shadow of Dr Who. He seems obsessed by history - the silly and obscure bits, as well as the famous dates - and the heroes of many of his poems are adept at time travel. One of the section of his book is called ‘My Experiences in the Maori Wars’, and one of his poems positively invites us to tamper with the laws of temporal displacement:

Please, put down the bow and look at my diagram. This dot is you. You lived your life, thousands of years ago, and died. Your skeleton proves my proposition: there it sits, almost invisibly, under your flesh, like a wicker chair holding a corpulent man. The bones are cruel and ambitious, and long to emerge, but they did not reckon with my time machine. Borrow the machine again, if you need to go home, to test my argument, but remember to drop it back before you leave.

Well, that’d sure beat traveling to Ashburton with Owen Marshall.

Titus is two years old and, like most two year olds, it’s a noisy, restless, unpredictable creature, little taken with the rules and routines of the adult world. I suppose that, given time, the brat will grow up, and publish safer, more predictable writers, and even carry off the odd Montana Book award. In the meantime, though, let’s enjoy the enfant terrible, and the shrieks of horror it is summoning from some of the more timid members of New Zealand’s literary establishment.

Claudia Westmoreland

The books Claudia has reviewed can be acquired via the Titus website, and from these fine bookshops:

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Enquiries

This sign-scuplture is part of an exhbition called Enquiries bing staged by Manu Scott at Auckland's Oedipus Rex gallery. Scott's sign refers to the famous photo of Whina Cooper and her great-grandchild walking down a road near Hapua, New Zealand's northernmost settlement, on the first day of the epic 1975 Land Hikoi: The words 'Ake, ake, ake' refer viewers back to Orakau, site of the last major battle of the war that began when Europeans invaded the Waikato Kingdom in 1863. Near the end of the battle, when his troops were forced to fire plum stones because they had run out of bullets, the great Tainui chief Rewi Maniapoto jumped onto the battlements of the pa he was defending and shouted 'Ka whawhai tonu ahau ki a koe, ake, ake ake!', which translates as 'I shall fight against you, for ever and ever'. I remember ten thousand people chanting Rewi's words during the Waikato leg of the Seabed and Foreshore Hikoi of 2004, which retraced the route taken by marchers in 1975.

As well as the sign-scupltures, Scott's show includes a series of sad but beautiful photographs of the ruins of a Maori Boys School which recall Mark Hamilton's snapshots of the disused hospital at Tokanui. You can catch Enquiries until the end of the month.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Exit points

I know it's a cliche, but I've been trying to keep a dream logbook lately. Here's a recent entry - any allusions to real people and events are, as always, completely accidental and reliable. If you're interested in Philip Clairmont, then Martin Edmond's superb biocritical study is the place to go.

Dream (23/05/07)

Philip rolls himself a joint on the second-floor balcony of Auckland Trades Hall, then turns his back on the view of Freeman's Bay's renovated slums. A short, extravagantly bearded man is shouting silently on the other side of the glass door. As he shouts the man waves his arms wildly, so that it looks like he is trying to catch flies in his fists. Behind him, at the back of the improvised stage, AOTEAROA MARXIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE 1981 is painted in gold on a large red flag. Philip pulls a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and runs down the schedule. 5 pm: Owen Gager, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production and Contemporary Polynesian Struggle. 5.30 pm: Philip Clairmont, Art and Activism in Aotearoa Today.

Philip blows smoke away from his face and squints at the banner behind Gager. Just off the centre of a deep, rough, almost undulating field of red paint - mid-period Matisse - a black fist grasps a gun. A Kalashnikov, most likely. The weapon of freedom fighters, of Mozambique and Nicaragua. Of Baader and Meinhof. The painter blundered - the barrel and handle are almost at right angles. Perhaps he or she was stoned. Perhaps the conference wants to catch up with Braque and Malevich, and reject the laws of perspective along with the law of profit. Is the fist holding the gun aloft, or crushing it? Is the gun sprouting out of the fist, like the crosses that grew out of the opened palms of Tony Fomison's student paintings? A young man wearing spotless dungarees and a summer holidays beard steps onto the balcony and reaches for the roach of Philip's joint. 'You're on, comrade. I'll finish.'

Philip begins slowly, scratching his beard and thumbing his notebook. Some of them have seen him at Palmerston North. Some of them have seen him on the barbed wire at the edge of Auckland airport, on the last day of the Tour. Some of them have seen him in their weekend paper, on the page between the racing tips and the TV schedule, two inches tall, in black and white, next to The Crucifixion Triptych, reproduced in black and white and grey, three by four inches. Upside down. Both painter and painting trapped beside a review, two hundred and fifty words, written by the subeditor of the paper's sporting pages.

'History is not consecutive', Philip hears himself saying. 'History is not a golden arrow, travelling inexorably toward one target, but a flock of wild birds flying and thrashing about in a storm, moving in every direction at once.' Gager and a couple of other Trots are nodding in the front row. 'Space and time have many exit points. One exit is drugs. Another is painting. A third is music. We must venture outside, and return -'

'Hippy bullshit. You've been on the wacky baccy, comrade.' That's Don, the Don who sold Philip a soggy newspaper outside the rugby game in Palmy. On the masthead of the paper, above the words RED SUN - OPPRESSED PEOPLES OF THE WORLD UNITE, the granite heads of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao rose in turn. A panel of experts. A range of mountains. The sun rose, or set, behind Mao's glowing dome. Because the print was smudged, one of the sun's beams seemed to emanate from the Chairman's ear. 'You're trivialising Marx, his view of history. Iron laws -'

The Don who had spent their two hours in the lockup at Palmy police station explaining that history followed iron laws, that feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, followed each other automatically, inevitably, like - what was the analogy, the image Don used? 'It's like the seasons - one leads to another. Like Marx leads to Lenin leads to Stalin leads to comrade Mao.’ One of the Trots is sighing loudly. Gager coughs and begins to pick his nose.

'Not true, comrade.' Philip hates the way his voice jumps an octave whenever he is nervous, or angry, or both. 'Marx travelled through Russia disguised as Tolstoy in 1880 and saw everything. The peasant communes about to be enclosed, like the Commons of Wimbledon and Jarrow and Parihaka. Black clouds of factory smoke ready to burst over thatched cottages and collective gardens. Ploughshares hollowed and straightened into rifles. History straightened into an axle. Marx wrote to Vera Zasulich to disown Plekhanov, Kautsky, the traitors -'

Don isn't listening. Don is out of his seat, marching down the aisle in a blue trenchcoat, a blue Kraut helmet, a plastic visor. He is Sergeant Wolfkamp, the man whose baton bounced Clairmont off the shiny new wire on the edge of the tarmac at Auckland airport on the 13th of September. 'The law -'. Wolfkamp swallows, stares into the misted plastic, tries to deepen his voice. 'The law must be enforced.' A column of Blue Squad cops fills the aisle behind him. The benches on either side are empty, except for a couple of piles of soggy newspapers. 'Draw your batons, comrades.'

Philip turns to run. The wall is three feet away. The banner hanging over the wall is trembling. Its fist uncurls into an open palm, then dissolves to show a table, a bowl of pears, and a window opening onto the hills behind Mangamahu. Two stars ache in the sky, and moonlight lies on the highest hills, heavy as lead. Mangamahu, No Tour: Moonlight Night Window, acrylic on board. Painted in July, exhibited in September, at Dennis Cohn's little gallery. Sold, to a thin lady in a fur coat, for six hundred and eighty dollars.

Philip half turns his head in the direction of his pursuers, then slowly, carefully, lifts first one leg then the other into the painting, into the room with the open window, the room filled with thick moonlight. The room, the window, the moonlight, and the hills of Mangamahu disappear with him, a moment before Sergeant Wolfkamp's baton strikes a badly painted black fist.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Moonlight coldly calling

I think it was Dylan Thomas, in a boozy interview near the end of his life, who defined poetry as whatever made his toenails curl up and his hair stand on end. I'm not sure about my toenails, but Gunnar Ekelof was one of the first writers to make my hair stand on end, back in the days when I had hair. Ekelof may be overshadowed by his compatriot Tomas Transtromer, winner of this blog's greatest living scribbler poll, but his mixture of Eastern mysticism and brooding Scandinavian imagery still leaves most native Anglophone poets in the shade - that's the conclusion I reached, anyway, after encountering a long-lost copy of Robert Bly's translation of Ekelof's first book down the back of a sagging bookcase a couple of days ago.

I know Bly is an excitable fellow who likes to run around bare-chested in the woods banging drums, but I reckon he got it right when he introduced Late Arrival on Earth forty years ago:

Some of Gunnar Ekelof's poems are made of linked successions of thoughts that are not easy to follow. We have no one like him in English or American poetry...He is an uncomfortable poet; he tries to make the reader conscious of lies and of the uncomfortable and shifty nature of the human ego. His poems float along like souls above the border between religion and witchcraft...

Here's a poem I particularly liked when I first read Ekelof as an eighteen year-old:

The Moon

The moon passes her hand softly over my eyes,Wakes me long into the night. Lonesome among the sleepers,I lay wood on the fire, fuss about with smoking sticks,Move quietly among the shadows, shadows flapping highAbove the brown logs, richlyDecorated with glistening fish-lures...

Why did I wake? Lonesome among the sleepers,Backs turned to the fire, I open the door quietly,Walk around the corner in the snow, tramp on the clumps, seeMoonlight coldly calling me over the snow...

This poem is at once easy and difficult to grasp. We don't have any trouble seeing the scene and actions that Ekelof describes, but we may well ask ourselves what exactly they are supposed to mean. I always imagined that 'The Moon' was a poem about alienation, about an individual's exclusion from the mainstream of society, and of the necessity, perhaps even desirability, of that exclusion. I thought of the narrator of 'The Moon' as a sort of Swedish incarnation of Sweeney, the wandering, lonely, vision-prone King-in-exile who haunts classical Irish poetry.

When I read 'The Moon' to Skyler tonight, though, she decided immediately that it was a poem about death. Rereading it, I can see her point. It's possible I based too much of my reading on a few scraps of biographical information. Gunnar Ekelof was born into one of Sweden's wealthiest families, but his surname became infamous in Stockholm after his father contracted syphilis and was sent to a lunatic asylum to die. In the chapel of his posh private school, young Gunnar began a lifelong rebellion against Christianity and bourgeois society by mouthing the phrase 'Om namah shivaya' silently whenever he was required to join in a mass rendition of The Lord's Prayer or some holy dirge.

In the 1930s Ekelof was one of a group of young modernist poets who were associated with Sweden's left-wing workers' movement; he even published some of his work in the press of the Communist Party. But Ekelof never really felt understood by any section of the Swedish public, and eventually withdrew into the life of a recluse. He became obsessed with mysticism and the occult, and went so far as to claim that the poems of his last years were dictated by the ghost of a medieval Kurdish prince.

Dissatisfaction with the strictures of socialist realism may just possibly offer some sort of explanation for this poem in Late Arrival on Earth:

Monologue with its wife

Take two extra-old cabinet ministers and overtake them on the North SeaProvide each of them with a comet in the rearSeven comets eachSend a wire:If the city of Trondheim takes them it will be bombedIf the suet field allows them to escape it will be bombedNow you have to signal:Larger ships approachingDon't you see, there in the radio! Larger shipin converging path. Send a warning!All small strawberry boats shall be ordered to go into the shore and lie down

- Come and help me, please, I am disappearing. That God is in the process of transforming me, that one in the corner over there, that one whispering in the corner

Go figure. For my money, the strongest poem in Late Arrival on Earth is the hypnotic 'Trolldom in Fall', which reads like TS Eliot under the influence of some of the particularly potent magic mushrooms which reportedly grow near the Arctic Circle:

Trolldom in Fall

Be still, be silent and wait,Wait for the animal, wait for the sign that is coming,Wait for the miracle, wait for the defeat that is coming,When time has lost its saltiness. It soars with dead stars past burning skerries.It arrives in dawn or dusk.Day and night are not its time.When the sun sinks in the loam and the moon in stone it shall comeWith dead stars on burnt ships...Then the blood-stained doors shall be open for everything possible.Then the bloodless doors shall be closed forever.The fields shall fill with unseen steps and the air with unheard sounds,Cities shall tumble down punctually like chimes of a clock,The shells of the ear shall explode as if deep down in waterAnd the infinite meekness of time shall be immortalisedDeep in dead eyes, and in extinguished candlesBy the miracle that grazes their houses.Be still, be silent, and wait,Without breathing until the morning dusk opens its eyes without breathing until the evening dusk closes its eyes.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Aka aka

Sunday, May 20, 2007

The Red and the Green

The latest issue of Red and Green, the journal of left scholarship and discussion founded in 2002, arrived in my letterbox yesterday morning. Issue six includes my take on Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, a new piece by Brian Roper, the long-time leader of the embattled Marxist minority in Otago University's Political Science Department, Len Richards' fascinating, archaeological study of the layered histories of the Otahuhu railway workshops, which were known for good reason as 'New Zealand's working class university', a memoir about the legendary waterside workers' leader Toby Hill, and much else besides.

The one rotten apple in the box is Matthew Stephen's gravely misinformed history of the movements against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is too full of redbaiting and self-congratulatory liberal waffle to deserve a place in a socialist journal. A reply is on the way, comrade.

Here's the full line-up:

RED & GREEN: New Zealand Journal of Left Alternatives #6

CONTENTS

ARTICLES

The Council of Trade Unions and the struggle against the Employment Contracts ActBrian Roper

The engineer, the Wobbly and the scribeLen Richards

The post-September 11 Anti War Movement in New ZealandMatthew Stephen

HISTORY

Toby Hill (1915 - 1977) Gerry Hill and others

Remembrance: Men and Women of ‘51 Len Gale

INTERNATIONAL

Human rights on the agenda in PhilippinesRod Prosser

Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution Scott Hamilton

BOOK REVIEWS

National exposed: Wayne Hope reviews The Hollow Men by Nicky Hager (2006)

Lest we forget: Len Richards makes additional comments on The Hollow Men

The power of speaking truth: Chris Trotter reviews Speaking Truth to Power

The ‘War on Terror’ and the class war at home: Jason Schulman reviews Blood in the Sand

DISCOURSE

Let the “underclass” roar: Jill Ovens

Swap Treaty rights for human rights: Bernard Gadd

The curse of nationalism: Don Franks

POETRY

Haven on earth? Don Franks

Available by return email (cost $12.50; 162 pages: Subscription $25 for two issues).

Friday, May 18, 2007

By the company he keeps

My piece on the election of Jose-Ramos Horta in East Timor is up on the Labor Tribune site, along with this creepy photo. To me, the photo symbolises Horta's relationship with Australia's army and its masters in Canberra. I'd guess that it was snapped last June or July, when Horta and Xanana Gusmao accompanied Anzac troops around a riot-torn Dili urging their supporters to wait calmly for the distribution of emergency supplies of rice. The chronic failure of the Horta-led government to ensure an affordable supply of rice to the poor has been largely ignored by Western media, yet it is one of the major causes of the instability that continues to afflict East Timor.

On the Marxmail list, Aussie activist and scholar Tom O'Lincoln has responded to my take on Horta's victory:

A very useful article, but I'm inclined to challenge you on a few points. It's true that Ramos-Horta only won because the other parties backed him, so it's not as big a win for him as it seems. But it's certainly as big a defeat for Fretilin as it seems. They're still paying for having been in government when things fell apart last year; and more generally for presiding over years of poverty with no sign of a way out.

It's true that the foreign troops engaged in a certain amount of intimidation, but that hardly explains why Fretilin couldn't get more than 30% of the vote. It's true that there are elements of Timorese society turning against the foreign troops, but they're still a distinct minority -- or else Fretilin, which seems to have run an anti-Australian campaign, would surely have done better.

For this reason I predict Fretilin will not win a majority in the parliamentary elections. If they win a plurality, an anti-Fretilin coalition will form a government, at least initially. OK, I'm committed now; we'll see whether I end up with egg on my face. :-)

If we do see the consolidation of a Horta-Gusmao regime, I wonder whether Canberra and Wellington will commit serious economic resources to East Timor to ensure they survive. Without that, or even with it, the *medium*-term prospects for a more generalised hostillity to Australia and New Zealand are indeed significant.

Here's my response to Tom:

I agree with you about the damage to Fretilin - this result confirms that they have, in effect, lost the west of the country. They are no longer the party of national liberation movement, in the way that, say, the ANC still is, despite all its failings, in South Africa. They are now essentially a regional party.

I never agreed with those like John Pilger who saw last year's violence as nothing more than the result of an imperialist plot against a progressive government. There was a genuine movement based on western grievances which Horta and Canberra co-opted.

What we may well see after the June 30th elections is the emergence of three blocs in parliament - a Fretilin bloc, a Horta-Gusmao bloc based on the CNRT, and a western bloc based on the Social Democratic Association and the Democratic Party. It is notable that Fretilin has already begun to try to build bridges with some of the parties that sided with Horta in the lead-up to the run-off.

I disagree with you when you suggest that we can use electoral support for Fretilin as a sort of index to anti-occupation feeling. Fretilin did not run a consistently anti-Australian campaign - complaints about harrassment by Aussie troops were balanced by indignant protests when Horta caved in to Democratic Party pressure and abandoned the hunt for Reinado before the run-ff vote. The Democratic Party's support for Reinado, who has become - for opportunistic reasons, no doubt - a bitter opponent of the Australians also suggests that not all the anti-Fretilin votes should be taken as votes for the occupation.

Two year olds tend to divide opinion. Some people dote on the cute little things, knitting them jumpers that will soon be too small, reading them bedside stories they can’t understand, and hanging on their every mispronounced word. Other, possibly more objective adults speak of the ‘terrible twos’, and hope the little horrors will soon grow out of midnight tantrums and food flinging.

It seems only natural, then, that Titus Books should be dividing writers and readers up and down the country, two years after it threw its first stone into the small and rather stagnant pond known as New Zealand literature. In the most recent issue of Landfall, this country’s oldest literary rag, Katherine Liddy gave the new boy the thumbs up, declaring that ‘with Titus, New Zealand literature just got a whole lot more interesting’. Reviewing Bill Direen’s Titus-published novel Song of the Brakeman in the Autumn 2007 issue of New Zealand Books, Heather Murray took a far less indulgent view of the little brat, accusing it of a ‘personal anarchy’ that makes ‘successful writing’ impossible. Ouch.

Mairangi Bay shock-blogger and rising literary star Jack Ross has weighed into the debate, by calling Titus ‘the Flying Nun of the twentieth century’. The comparison isn’t quite as silly as it might seem. Like Flying Nun, Titus is a low budget, high art operation designed to preserve and publicise work that the mainstream culture industry either marginalises or ignores altogether. While the big university-based publishers roll on down the middle of the literary road, Titus specialises in finding interesting things in that dangerous-looking ditch beside the left lane.

The Flying Nun comparison works, too, when we consider that a couple of the three latest poets to be published by Titus are seasoned live performers, as familiar with the dodgy PAs and flying glasses of Auckland’s seedier pubs as any sad middle-aged muso. Richard Taylor was a member of the drunken, drugged up Poetry Brats, the dominant gang on Auckland’s live poetry scene in the early 1990s. Will Christie was a mainstay of the same scene in the first years of the noughties, when she was known for the bizarre, Goth-influenced aerobics exercises that accompanied her readings.If Titus is the Flying Nun of Kiwi literature, then Will Christie is the Dead C. Like that chaotic but sometimes exhilarating band, she has chosen to make an art form out of fragmentation and dissonance. The Dead C torture guitars, to produce exquisite bursts of feedback and fragments of mangled melody; Christie tortures her language, and gets a similar effect:

Ladylaydelaydeladylaydelaydeladylay de

Lady fOR GO

get IT !!SURE

Broken sentences, hyperactive syntax, and runaway punning give Christie’s writing a deliberately unfinished feel. These poems are like open-ended jams. Christie wants you to take your hands off you ears, pick up a guitar, and play with her, or against her - to lay a solo or a slab of feedback over her unsteady riffing.

Richard Taylor perhaps deserves to be called the Chris Knox of Titus Books. Taylor has Knox’s quirkiness, his tirelessness, and his disconcerting tendency to veer from highfalutin’ phraseology to Kiwi crudity at the drop of a beer:

God lives in the stone these days, terrified of his child, paralysed by insanity or the surprise of something leaping, like that wave by Hokusai. Suffering piles - he can’t think of anything else: of nothing else think he. Everything blowing to fuck.

Taylor’s book is divided between the wild and often wildly funny poems that he performed in the ’90s, and the more sober - I use that adjective advisedly - pieces of recent years. The ‘bridge’ between the two groups is ‘Hospital’, a long poem-journal that Taylor kept during a sometimes nightmarish stay in Middlemore Hospital in 2004. Lying in a crowded and noisy ward, deprived of drugs and alcohol, and forced to listen to the nihilistic monologues of a patient who has just done a seventeen year tour of duty in Paremoremo Prison, Taylor finds a new directness, and perhaps a new honesty:

The short dream shifts. Am I now awake? The night nurse talks to an arthritic young man called Garth about his infected leg. Spider Man, Third Man, is asleep, I think. The old man was coughing. I say (in a loutish voice, as if rallying): ‘How are we team!’ I can’t move far with my leg cast so I can’t hold the old bugger’s hand. Night is the time of fear. We are visited. The nurse take my piss bottle. Moves on, returns. My toes wiggle more - more feeling…

The manic wordplay of Taylor’s early poetry and the wry, sometimes self-deprecatory exercises of more recent years sit beside one another a little uneasily, like strangers forced together on an overcrowded train. Perhaps the sequel to Conversation with a Stone will see them talking to one another?

Scott Hamilton’s favourite Flying Nun band is probably The Verlaines. Hamilton shares with Graeme Downes’ outfit a taste for complex structures, a fondness for allusion, and - let’s face it - a tendency to walk the fine line between intelligence and pretension. Like Downes and his cronies, Hamilton seems to have spent too long in a university library. Reading his prose poems is like going to a cool but boring party and being trapped with the weird guy you haven’t seen since seventh form - the guy wearing brown-rimmed glasses and a brown dufflecoat, and drinking someone else’s Corona - who wants to talk about his pet obsession. Part of you wants to get away, to mingle with the beautiful people and talk about cars or designer drugs, but another part of you somehow wants to know more about Bob Dylan’s unreleased recordings, or socialism in Venezuela, or the differences between a pole and a post.A typical Hamilton poem begins as a slightly stuffy discourse about some specific subject, before becoming first strangely obsessive, and then obsessively strange, as pedantry turns into poetry. Here’s the end of a poem which began as a guide to the theory of evolution:

Before the flood dinosaurs, mammoths, and humans were contemporaries. Then the rock-strata were laid down, like backing tracks. The dinosaurs sank fastest, of course…Noah ran aground on an alpine peak, discovering a clinic that housed wealthy TB patients. We have been sickly and wasteful ever since, and we can only change by hiding ourselves. Cut off your tongue, and you will become telepathic. Pluck out your eyes, and you will hear extinct native birds chiming in the boughs. Crush your scrotum between two stones, and you will be able to fall in love. This is called evolution.

I’d wager that Hamilton is one of that generation of males raised in the shadow of Dr Who. He seems obsessed by history - the silly and obscure bits, as well as the famous dates - and the heroes of many of his poems are adept at time travel. One of the section of his book is called ‘My Experiences in the Maori Wars’, and one of his poems positively invites us to tamper with the laws of temporal displacement:

Please, put down the bow and look at my diagram. This dot is you. You lived your life, thousands of years ago, and died. Your skeleton proves my proposition: there it sits, almost invisibly, under your flesh, like a wicker chair holding a corpulent man. The bones are cruel and ambitious, and long to emerge, but they did not reckon with my time machine. Borrow the machine again, if you need to go home, to test my argument, but remember to drop it back before you leave.

Well, that’d sure beat traveling to Ashburton with Owen Marshall.

Titus is two years old and, like most two year olds, it’s a noisy, restless, unpredictable creature, little taken with the rules and routines of the adult world. I suppose that, given time, the brat will grow up, and publish safer, more predictable writers, and even carry off the odd Montana Book award. In the meantime, though, let’s enjoy the enfant terrible, and the shrieks of horror it is summoning from some of the more timid members of New Zealand’s literary establishment.

Claudia Westmoreland

The books Claudia has reviewed can be acquired via the Titus website, and from these fine bookshops:

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Smudge and Jeoffrey

This is a photograph of a kitten named Smudge who has just invited herself into my study. I'm not familiar with any poems about felines called Smudge, so I'm going to quote the famous tribute to a cat named Jeoffrey that occupies one corner of the rambling madhouse poem Christopher Smart called Jubilate Agno:

For my Cat Jeoffrey

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.For he rolls upon prank to work it in.For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.For this he performs in ten degrees.For first he looks upon his fore-paws to see if they are clean.For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore-paws extended.For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.For fifthly he washes himself.For Sixthly he rolls upon wash.For Seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.For Eighthly he rubs himself against a post.For Ninthly he looks up for his instructions.For Tenthly he goes in quest of food.For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it chance.For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.For he is of the tribe of Tiger.For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.For every house is incompleat without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.For every family had one cat at least in the bag.For the English Cats are the best in Europe.For he is the cleanest in the use of his fore-paws of any quadrupede.For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.For he is tenacious of his point.For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.For he knows that God is his Saviour.For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually – Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in compleat cat.For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in musick.For he is docile and can learn certain things.For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.For he can catch the cork and toss it again.For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.For the former is affraid of detection.For the latter refuses the charge.For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly,For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.For his ears are so acute that they sting again.For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity.For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede.For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.For he can swim for life.For he can creep.

Submit

New brief editor Brett Cross has broken decisively with the slovenly ways of his predecessor by making the end of May the deadline for contributions to the next issue of New Zealand's coolest literary journal. If the printers behave themselves, Brett should bring brief #35 into the world sometime early in July, a mere four months or so since number 34 completed its long journey out of a sodden box at the bottom of my wardrobe. (Don't even ask about brief #33...)

Brett even has a cover ready for his first issue, thanks to the splendid Matt, whose design recalls those heroic early days when the journal was edited by Alan 'the great uniter' Loney, and went by the humble name A Brief Description of the Whole World. There are no excuses left, comrades - get those submissions in by the end of May! Send e copy to graull@snap.net.nz, or hard copy to PO Box 102, Waimauku, West Auckland.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

From Slipper Island

Every time I pass through Hamilton I try to visit the local museum, which has a good stash of New Zealand paintings and a superb collection of artifacts from the Tainui iwi. Because the collection is so large and display space is limited, there are different taonga on display every time I visit. The artifacts - carved canoe prows, fragments of razed meeting houses, greenstone mere the colour of karaka leaves, godsticks hidden for decades in flax baskets at the bottom of Waikato swamps - are housed in clear glass cases in a succession of dark rooms; they seem to float in space.

When we visited last week Skyler took this cellphone photo of a carved pumice head found on the Slipper Island, which is part of the turangawaewae of the Tainui subtribe Ngati Hei in the southeast Coromandel.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Horta's victory: behind the hype

John Howard, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, and newspapers across Australasia have hailed the big win of Jose Ramos Horta in the second round of East Timor's Presidential elections as a victory for the peace and unity of the fledgling nation. Speaking to Australian reporters, Howard called Horta, who won 69% of the vote in a run-off with Fretilin's Francisco 'Lu Olo' Guterres, a 'good friend' and 'the hope of our side'. The New Zealand Herald suggested that the size of Horta's win 'increased hopes for unity' in a 'poor nation still struggling to heal divisions'.

The real meaning of Horta's victory is considerably more complex. After being humiliated in the first round of the election, he has been able to prevail against Guterres only by exacerbating East Timor's regional differences and relying on the Australian troops which dominate the 'International Stabilisation Force' occupying East Timor.

To the shock of his boosters in Canberra and Wellington, Horta won a mere 22% of the vote in the first round of the Presidential election held on April the 9th. Horta prevailed in Dili, where he and his close ally Xanana Gusmao have the support of the country's business elite, a part of the civil service, and many young people. In the eastern districts of the country, though, Horta was no match for Guterres, and in the west he generally trailed behind the candidates of the Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Association (ADST). With 19% of the national vote, the Democratic Party’s Francisco de Araujo almost won the right to challenge Guterres in the second round.

Horta took the Presidency not because of his promises of tax cuts and praise for John Howard, but because he won the endorsement of de Araujo and ADST leader Francisco Amaral in the lead-up to the second round of voting. Both de Araujo and Amaral have their bases in the heavily-populated western region of East Timor, and the real story of these elections has been the emergence of the west as an independent political force.

To understand the present situation in East Timor we need to remember that the western part of the country has been marginalised in the years since the end of Indonesian occupation in 1999. Easterners have always occupied most of the leadership positions in Fretilin, and they inevitably dominated the first government of East Timor. When the Falintil guerrilla forces which had fought the Indonesians were cantoned, demobilised, and converted into a smaller national army in 1999 and early 2000, it was fighters from the east who were preferred by the leadership of Fretilin.

Westerners who did make it into the army often faced discrimination and harsh conditions. Early last year a group of them mutinied and staged a series of marches which were attacked by police loyal to Fretilin Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri. The rebels, who became known as 'the Petitioners', soon attracted the backing of many westerners, as well as a faction of opponents of Alkatiri's government led by Horta and East Timorese President Xanana Gusmao.

Close friends of the Howard and Bush administrations, Horta and Gusmao were opposed to the relatively independent foreign policy that Alkatiri had tried to follow since becoming Prime Minister in 2002. Working closely with the Australian government, which particularly disliked Alkatiri's ties to Portugal, China and Cuba and his hardball negotiating over the oil and gas reserves in the disputed Tmor Gap, Horta and Gusmao turned the Petitioners' movement into a general uprising against the Alkatiri government.

By the middle of 2006, East Timor's major towns were racked by violence, and the police and army had split down the middle along regional lines. Complaining of a 'coup' against his government, Alkatiri reluctantly agreed to the deployment of an Australian-dominated 'stabilisation' force to East Timor. Using the troops as leverage, the Howard government and Alkatiri's enemies soon forced Alkatiri's replacement by Horta.

The deployment of troops was supported by both the majority in Fretilin and the westerners who had been fighting Alkatiri. Fretilin leaders hoped the force would put down the western rebellion; westerners hoped it would marginalise Alkatiri and Fretilin. For its part, the Howard government was determined to make sure that the new government in Dili was be less troublesome than Alkatiri's regime.

By the beginning of this year it was clear that the new status quo in East Timor was unravelling. Horta and Gusmao were bitterly resented by a cabinet and parliament still dominated by Fretilin and loyal to Alkatiri. Violent clashes between gangs continued in many places, and more than thirty thousand refugees were refusing to leave camps they had established in and around Dili. Drought and government ineptitude led to a serious shortage of rice and food riots in the towns. Australian security forces acted autocratically and sometimes brutally, alienating locals. The alliance between anti-Fretilin westerners, Horta, and the Australians fell apart, as Alfredo Reinado, the leader of the Petitioners, was arrested and imprisoned.

In January and February, the occupying forces struggled to hold the line for Horta's embattled government. Australian and New Zealand troops helped to disperse crowds of food rioters and guard rice supplies in Dili and Bacau, and in doing so earned the enmity of the hungriest parts of the population. On February the 23rd, Australian troops attacked the Comoro refugee camp outside Dili. The residents of the camp had become a thorn in Horta's side by refusing to disperse and staging regular anti-government protests. The Australians used two tanks to smash through the barricades at Comoro, and their infantry shot three youths, two of whom died of their wounds. As word of the deaths spread, protesters filled the streets of Dili, chanting 'Australians go home' and stoning the occupiers' vehicles. The residents of Comoro drafted a statement calling for Australian withdrawal from East Timor.

The crisis with the western rebels came to a head on March the 4th, when Australian SAS troops killed five Timorese in a bungled raid on a suspected hiding place of Reinado, who had escaped from prison and led a group of armed followers into the hills south of Dili. New protests erupted on the streets of Dili, as youths loyal to Reinado built barricades of burning tyres and attacked restaurants where foreigners dined.

The first round of the Presidential elections confirmed the failure of Horta and Gusmao to win a majority of East Timorese to their side. Horta and his Australian backers had alienated the west, as well as the Fretilin-dominated east. Horta's campaign promises to turn East Timor into 'a new Hong Kong', his enthusiasm for tax cuts, and his support for Bush and Howard's foreign policies, including the war in Iraq, did little to boost his support.

In the month between the first and second round of voting, Horta followed a twin-track strategy in a desperate effort to prevail over Guterres. He tried to capture the western vote by securing the support of its two main recipients, the Social Democratic Association and the Democratic Party. Leading members of both parties were promised key roles in a Horta-led government, and military operations against Reinado and his rebels were unceremoniously abandoned, at the request of the Democratic Party.

Horta and his friends in Canberra tried to neutralise the threat of Fretilin by stepping up the intimidation of the party's campaigners by the Australian forces that were supposed to be providing 'security' for the election. Even before the first round of voting, Fretilin had complained of blatant Australin interference in its campaign. On March the 26th, for instance, Australian troops stopped a convoy of vehicles containing Alkatiri and Guterres at gunpoint, and threatened the life of an aide to Alkatiri.

In the lead-up to the second round of voting, Australian intimidation became even more blatant. Australian helicopters flew over Fretilin's last two election rallies, and heavily armed soldiers ranged amongst the crowds, terrifying Guterres' supporters. In a statement issued a few days before the poll, Fretilin complained that it was receiving daily reports of Australian interference in its campaign from grassroots activists.

It was Horta's cynical strategy, and not any sudden Timorese fondness for John Howard and flat taxes, which succeeded in reversing his fortunes and winning him a big majority of the vote in the second round of elections for President. Because of the way it was achieved, Horta's victory will not bring peace and unity to East Timor. On the contrary, it promises to exacerbate the country's regional and political differences. Horta has promised leaders from the west of the country a share of power, but East Timor’s constitution makes the post of President a largely symbolic one. To consolidate this victory and achieve real power, the faction around Horta and Gusmao needs to win a majority of seats in the parliamentary elections scheduled for June the 30th and create a new Prime Minister and Cabinet line-up of their choice. Their fledgling National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) party is still a small splinter from the Fretilin organisation, and is unlikely to win anything like a majority at the end of June. If Fretilin wins a majority or even a plurality of seats, then a constitutional crisis could quickly develop, as Horta faces off against a hostile Prime Minister. If parliament is divided between Fretilin, on the one hand, and the CNRT and its western allies, on the other hand, then East Timor's regional tensions could be exacerbated rather than healed.

The use of Australian troops against Fretilin during the Presidential election campaign has compounded the work done by the attack on Comoro refugee camp and the bungled raid on Reinado, and turned large numbers of East Timorese against the occupation. Resistance to the foreign forces can be expected to grow, along with conflict between east and west. The celebrations of Horta's supporters in Canberra and in the media are premature.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Go Katipo

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Deterring democracy

Today the Australasian media is full of glowing reports about a peaceful election in East Timor overseen by smiling Anzac troops, but one of the parties contesting the Presidential run-off poll has taken a rather more jaundiced view of the events of the past few days. Here's one of a number of recent Fretilin press releases which have been bitterly critical of the occupiers:

Media release 6 May 2007

ISF troops disrupt two FRETILIN rallies

ISF troops have disrupted two peaceful FRETILIN mass meetings in the final week of East Timor’s presidential election campaign.

“The ISF military behaved in a heavy-handed and intimidatory way towards our supporters,” Fernandes said.

“Timor Leste is a sovereign country, no longer under foreign military occupation, and the ISF should not be frightening and intimidating an entirely peaceful election gathering.”

Fernandes said yesterday’s ISF security operation in Dili, supposedly at the request of the United Nations police force UNPOL, involved major use of helicopters, heavy armoured vehicles and armed troops which intimidated people seeking to attend his dialogue at Borja da Costa Park in the suburb of Farol.

“The ISF and UNPOL have no right to interfere with the legitimate political activities of the Timorese people, ” he said.

He said Lu’Olo’s opponent Jose Ramos Horta had boasted of his close relationship with Australian Prime Minister Howard during the campaign, seeking to make it an election issue.

“Whether intended or not, the actions of the troops have compromised the Australian military’s public assertions of neutrality in this election,” Fernandes said.

“At Ainaro on Thursday, while Lu’Olo was addressing the rally, a helicopter landed very close to the crowd and armed soldiers in full combat rig moved among the crowd.”

Fretilin General Secretary Mari Alkatiri sent a written protest about the Ainaro incident to the Australian military commander Brigadier Mal Rerden.

Alkatiri wrote: ”We have been told that the ISF action was in response to a request from UNPOL to provide security. We ask, whose security is being provided for by such threatening behaviour? Certainly not the security of our members and supporters, who, on the contrary, have good reason to believe that this was an attempt to challenge their right to assembly under our Constitution.”

Alkatiri’s letter continued: “I do not need to remind you that this election is occurring in highly sensitive circumstances, in which the maintenance of neutrality and the appearance of neutrality by the ISF is of the utmost importance.

The FRETILIN candidate has publicly criticised our opponent for attempting to use the ISF inappropriately in the campaign, when he said he would call off the action against Reinado. We expect the ISF to maintain neutrality, and we will publicly defend their right and their duty not to be drawn into a political campaign. Our Constitution is clear on the need for the armed forces to remain free of political interference.”

In reply Brigadier Rerden said he would “endeavour in future to alter helicopter flights so that they do not inadvertently coincide with Mr Lu Olo’s rallies.” He denied that troops entered the rally and mixed with the crowd.

However video footage which will be available at Lu Olo’s news conference today clearly shows troops among the crowd.

Fernandes said Fretilin received daily complaints from its supporters of harassment and intimidation by ISF troops.

“We are not convinced that there is no connection between the troops’ behavior and the Australian government’s apparent support for Jose Ramos Horta,” Fernandes said.

He pointed to a classified Australian Defence Force minute, published in Australia’s Bulletin magazine on June 6 2006, which stated: “Australia's strategic interests can also be protected and pursued more effectively if Australia maintains some degree of influence over East Timor's decision-making."

There's nothing new in this behaviour, of course. If you want to campaign against the presence of Kiwi troops in East Timor, then get in touch with these fine folks.

New (old) album from Nick

I've been a Nick Drake fan since I bought one of his albums on a hunch and played 'Things Behind the Sun' to a murky student flat:

Open up the broken cupLet goodly sin and sunshine inYes that's todayAnd open wide the hymns you hideYou'll find renown where people foundThings that you sayOh yeah, say what you wanna sayAbout the farmers and the funAnd the things behind the sunAnd the people round your headWho say everything's been saidTil a movement in your brainSends you out into the rain

Alright, most of its songs are available on bootlegs, but this still has to be the most important lost classic to turn up since the Grundrisse came back to London in 1969. If you're wondering what the fuss is all about, check out this video for 'Pink Moon'.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Click for the fine print

Friday, May 04, 2007

Falling or flying

The writings and the doings of the worryingly prolific Jack Ross ('thirteen launches and four books last year - maaate') sometimes threaten to dominate this blog, so I think I understand some of the frustrations that Jack's older brother Ken must endure. Ken, who lives in Edinburgh and can play Chopin very fast on the piano, has been featured before on this blog as the proprietor of Crywolf Books, but he's a scribbler as well as a publisher, and his first novel Falling Through the Architect was published by brief books late in 2005. Perhaps because that brattish little brother is so intent on hogging the limelight, Ken's book hasn't yet received the attention it deserves.

Now, though, Bill Direen has written a warm review of Ken's book for the forthcoming 36th issue of brief, in the hope of making more Kiwi writers aware of the audacious prose of their northern kinsman. Since brief is a determinedly offline publication, I've gotten permission to prepublish the review here. If you like the sound of Falling Through the Architect, you can order the book through Crywolf.

Falling Through the Architect, by K.M Ross. Auckland, 2005. Available through The Writers Group, PO Box 102 Waimauku West Auckland, or online from Crywolf Books http://www.crywolfbooks.org. 30 dollars (NZ), 9.99 pounds (UK). Comments by William Direen.

As printed characters rely for meaning on the space immediately around them and upon other characters among which they exist in a work, Falling through the Architect realises its central narrative by means of oscillating but complementary narratives (or “anti-narratives”).

We are continually reminded of the novel’s textual nature: the ‘story’ in plain font is counterpoised by an unidentified voice in bold font which, as the boldness of the font accentuates, reads as a kind of tirade.

A "plain" narrative depicts the intersecting life-stories of several persons, into whose minds the writer enters at will. There is an accessible realism here. This is a story full of hard social facts, which relies on a careful geography inseparable from its erotic subterfuge. On the social front alone it is a valuable reflection of current Edinburgh mores and language usage. The “Scottishness” of the terrain is neatly blurred by the city's multi-cultural element, while the diversity of its inhabitants is unified by the acquired “Scots” of some of their dialogue (and the author’s deftness in this area). The street-plans and the plans of the interiors are particularly detailed and necessarily so, since, as we read, as we become more intimate with the text, physical reality becomes less physical! The eroticism, overtly heterosexual, ranges from battering roughness to mysterious finger signals or catastrophic onanism, and is present at various levels, sometimes violent.

The "bold" tirade draws on many sources — mystical, lyrical and musical. Its nature was not, at first, clear to me. I wanted to know how the alternating sequences related to each other, and what the ultimate design of the author was. Soon, questioning itself began to take on the form of an answer. After trying multiple-choice (‘Is the tirade the voice of more than one character, of a combined god-author character, or of a single fictional multi-facetted entity or design?’) I tried letting go all preconceived notions of ‘voice’ and allowed the tirade to issue from a sort of Negativeland, an alternative time-space continuum which, like the white between the ink of the text, rubs up against everyday lives, the hard-copy of our primary stories. And then...?

Then K.M Ross really began to fly!

W.D.

Footnote: and if there wasn't enough scribbling going on in the clan already, Jack and Ken's mother June, who was one of the North Shore's best-known GPs for three decades, has written a fine and frightening article about the depleted uranium contamination which has been one of the numerous fringe benefits of the US liberation of Iraq.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Who's honouring the past?

The Dominion Post has done its best to close down any debate about last week's Anzac Day protests with a nasty editorial that compares the protesters to neo-Nazis who would have liked Hitler to have won World War Two. One of the protesters has fired back a letter, which you can read here.

It’s notable that the defenders of the sanctity of Anzac Day tend to dwell on World War Two, rather than the score of other conflicts Australian and New Zealand troops have taken part in over the last century and a half.

World War Two is the only conflict in which Anzacs have fought for a progressive cause. All the others, from the Waikato War of 1863-64 to the Boer War to the farce of the First World War to the crusades against communism in Korea, Malaya, and Vietnam look very shabby today, when viewed in the cold sober light of fact, rather than through the prism of jingoism.

And even the hopes of the Anzacs who fought fascism in World War Two were in many ways betrayed, as the Allies turned the defeat of Japan into an operation to prop up rotten empires in the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina, and the war against Hitler segued into anti-communist pogroms in Greece and the cynical division of Europe into US and Soviet spheres of influence. The Allied war effort produced such horrific effects in South Asia that it encouraged tens of thousands of Indian nationalists to fight on the side of the Japanese.

Anzac Day actually does a grave disservice to the Anzacs who fought against fascism in World War Two, because it links them to criminal enterprises like the Vietnam War. Kiwis like John Mulgan, who hated fascism and fought alongside the European resistance to Hitler, have nothing to do with the Anzacs who terrorised the tangata whenua of Vietnam, or the poor conscripts who died for Winston Churchill’s ego on the beaches of Gallipoli.

Today it is the United States, rather than Germany and Japan, which represents the greatest threat to world peace. The aggressive imperialism of the Bush regime has set the Middle East ablaze and aroused opposition around the world. New Zealand is being dragged into Bush’s war in Afghanistan, and is supplying troops to the US-backed, Australian-led occupations of East Timor and the Solomons. In their opposition to aggressive imperialism and its wars of conquest, the Anzac Day protesters honour the memories of Kiwis who fought against fascism in World War Two more truly than the warmongers and nationalists rushing to salute the flag.